The Best American Poetry

A Week of Poetry, Photography and Thoughts About Art

Hello!  And what a pleasure it is to be here!

First things first:  This week I'll be posting my work along with photographs by Nikolai Lesnikov, who also lives here in Seattle, as well as brief essays about art and poetry that fascinate me, with calls for cooperative research so we can discover new ideas and answers.

I'll also post work by other poets, newspaper articles, the amazing things that crop up in this strange time.

Today, although we've had ice and sleet and rain, the sun is out.  Come with me down to the lake.

CARP

Between old hulls and piling rust,

anchors, huge chains, nets of yellow and orange,

greases and smells of creosote, forgotten cargoes;

the slabs of light break and move

suddenly into the shaft of water

eddying against the yard railing,

the cool, dark light of morning

gleams in luminescent movement,

lowering, partaking in

beans of houseboats, dock rails,

hulls reflected in blue lines,

visual fields of broken green shadow,

and below, below,

only what plants,

the carp with their dead-penny scales,

lumpy mouths,

older than centers, older than poetry,

slowly fanning into the channels--

bridges, bridges, everywhere.

"Getting My Goat" (by Laura Orem)

(First off, thank you, Stacey, for the picture this morning - it made my day!)

I've been thinking for a long time about getting a goat or two. Goats are winsome, clever, funny, and affectionate; they are also conniving, athletic, and easily bored, so you've got to have a good fence and lots of goat entertainment to keep them from figuring out ways to escape and run amok in your rutabagas. Unlike sheep, goats are challenging.

I've been toying with the idea of dairy goats, but that's an awful lot of work. You have to be committed to milking them twice a day, rain or shine, in sickness and in health - and I can tell you who would be the chief milkmaid at my house. I'm not sure I'm ready to commit to that. However, it's also possible just to have goats as pets. They aren't expensive to buy or to keep, and they are adorable, even when they are wreaking havoc across the property.

Here's a video from Beekman 1802, an organic farm in Sharon Springs, NY (check out their shop with goat's milk soap and heirloom seeds), demonstrating the off-the-scale cuteness of baby goats:

Even grown-up goats are charming. The breed I'm looking at in particular are mini La Manchas - a miniature dairy breed known for their affectionate and docile dispositions. They have the added allure of "elf ears," ears that are so tiny they are hardly visible. Here's a picture. Tell me if you don't fall instantly in love.

I like goats a lot, as you can probably tell. Goats were among the first domesticated farm animals, and people across the world keep goats in the same ways they have for thousands of years. Goats are hardy; they are herd animals and like lots of other goats as company; they can find forage in the most inhospitable of landscapes. (While they will try pretty much anything as lunch, they do not eat tin cans.) Goats can be kept on large stretches of property, or in a reasonably-sized backyard. Some suburban communities, in response to the economic crisis and the recent attention to our food supply, have revised covenants to allow residents to keep a goat or two (chickens also).

Here's is a terrific poem about a goat by the late New Jersey poet, Joe Salerno, who died from lung cancer in 1995 at the age of 48. I had the great pleasure of meeting Joe in 1991 at the Poetry Festival at St. Mary's College of Maryland. He was a lovely man - kind, self-effacing, funny, and breathtakingly talented. I heard him read this poem then; it has stayed with me ever since, and recently I discovered this video of Joe reading it on YouTube.

After his death, some of Joe's friends and colleagues put together a selection of his poems in a book called Only Here, with an afterword by Donald Hall (Joe had been Hall's student at Ann Arbor). I hate that he died so young. But Joe Salerno is someone whose too-short story is lifted out of tragedy by the scope and resonance of his poems. Read them.

A Kiss for Laura Orem

 

-- sdh

A Meditation on Mud (by Laura Orem)

This time of year, I'm preoccupied with mud. It hasn't gotten cold enough to really freeze the ground, but all the greenery is long gone. So, adding in animals with hooves, what you end up with is large quantities of mud. You sink in it up to your ankles in the pasture; it tracks all over; it's embedded in the cracks in the sidewalk; and I spend a lot of time picking it out of Black Jack's hooves. (It also makes it very difficult to pick up the poop, but let's stick to the matter at hand.)

Black Jack in the mud. He tramps around in quite happily. He also likes to roll in it - don't ask me why.

If it would snow, at least it would be pretty, but right now, life on the farm is lacking much aesthetic quality. It's the price we pay for springtime.

Speaking of springtime, I tried to find an appropriate muddy-winter poem to accompany this post, but I couldn't. There are lots of poems about mud, but they all seem to be placed in the spring and summer. Mud in warm weather has an entirely different feel than winter mud. No one is ever tempted to squish his bare toes in winter mud.

A famous poem that references springtime mud is e.e. cummings' "Chansons Innocents: I."  Now, I have a problem with most interpretations of this poem. Over and over again, I've seen explications of how this piece is a lovely evocation of the innocence of childhood. Well, yeah, but --- this poem creeps me out big time. It's that goat-footed balloonman. Where is he luring those kids? Some say the goat feet make him faunlike; I'm thinking demonic. And that "far and wee" - it's eerie. Where is he going?

"Chansons Innocentes: I"
by  e.e. cummings
in Just- spring when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman whistles far and wee and eddieandbill come running from marbles and piracies and it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful the queer old balloonman whistles far and wee and bettyandisbel come dancing from hop-scotch and jump-rope and it's spring and the goat-footed balloonMan whistles far and wee

Am I the only one who finds this profoundly disturbing, even with the wonderful "mud-/luscious"? Maybe I'm just reflecting back my winter mood, but I don't think so. It gives me the willies.

Anyway, there isn't much to do about the mud, except throw down some straw and wait for a freeze. In the meantime, Black Jack is having a good time, and if that balloonman shows up, I told Black Jack to give him a good kick.

Horse Sense (by Laura Orem)

Under the spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from "The Village Blacksmith"

The farrier came this week to trim and balance Black Jack's feet. For horse-owners, feet loom large, and the farrier is an important person. Horses can die if their feet aren't properly cared for. They are susceptible to infections, both fungal and bacterial, and horse-lovers have nightmares about hearing the dreaded word "laminitis," an inflammation/infection of the hoof wall that can and does kill horses (this is what did in poor Barbaro). So the farrier, the person who comes periodically to trim, balance, and sometimes shoe horses, is a vital ally in keeping a horse in good health.

A clarification:  "blacksmith" and "farrier" are related, but not interchangeable, terms. A blacksmith is a person who forges all manner of iron implements, including horseshoes; a farrier is an expert in hoof-care, who also fits, fabricates, and puts shoes on a horse. In Longfellow's day, when everyone had horses, these duties almost always overlapped, so the blacksmith and the farrier were the same person. Nowadays, while a farrier is always a blacksmith, a blacksmith isn't always a farrier.

A farrier balancing a hoof as the hoof's owner looks on. I don't
have a picture of Black Jack's session because I was assisting.

A Little Night Music [by Laura Orem]

For the past few nights, very early in the morning before the other birds stir, we've been hearing two owls talking with each other in the treetops outside our bedroom window. They have lengthy but quiet conversations, their hooting conducted in sotto voce. We know they are Great Horned owls by their calls; also, once or twice we've been lucky enough to catch a glimpse of one of them flying overhead in the dark. On an amazing night last summer, one sat quietly perched on the streetlight pole for ten minutes or so while we watched from a respectful distance. Mostly, though, we know of their presence only from their disembodied voices and the occasional pile of feathers in the middle of talon marks in the ground.

Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus)

Oh, Rats! [by Laura Orem]

One of the things that come with living on a farm is the presence of rats. Let me clarify this before my New York City readers faint in horror -- these are not the giant, aggressive rats of urban legend, who bully Rottweilers and carry switchblades. These are brown rats (Rattus norvegicus), smaller, a bit timid, the close cousins of the "fancy rats" that are kept as pets. If you live in the country and have a barn, especially if you have grain in it, you will have some rats. This is why most farmers keep barn cats.

Last summer, after we'd gotten the sheep and started storing grain, we began noticing a few rats in the barn. If we came upon them suddenly, we could occasionally catch them perched on the edge of the water tub, leaning in and drinking.  It was cute -- like a rat bar. Think of Charlotte's Web and Mrs Frisby and the Rats of NIHM . Those kind of rats. I immediately named them Templeton, Nicodemus, and Rizzo.

Most people shudder at the thought of a rat, but let me confess -- I really like rats. They have bright button eyes and inquisitive noses and whiskers. They are intelligent, affectionate, and social.  They are also altruistic, not only to other rats, but they have given their lives for hundreds of years in the name of medical research. I think they are cool. (I know they harbor diseases, but so do lots of animals, including humans.) If I didn't have six cats, I might have one or two as pets.

Snack time

The problem is, as I soon discovered, if you see one rat, you have three; if you see three, you probably have more than even a rat-lover would feel comfortable cohabiting with. They are kind of like people that way.

Horses and Poetry [by Laura Orem]

The relationship between people and horses is an ancient one. The cave paintings of Lascaux depict horses stampeding across a ghostly landscape.
 

This Chinese horse, painted by an artist named Han Gan, dates from the Tang Dynasty , 618-907 AD.

More on sheep and poetry

In 2002,  a British writer, Valerie Laws, was awarded a grant to investigate what the BBC called "a new form of 'random' literature." A flock of sheep had their backs painted with individual words; a new poem resulted each time the sheep stopped wandering for a minute or two. 

(BBC News, 4 December 2002)

A representative of the North East Arts Council, who awarded the grant, called it "an exciting fusion of poetry and quantum mechanics."

(BBC News, 4 December 2002)

Click here to read the original BBC news story and to read one of the poems

"August Pastoral" (by Laura Orem)

The sheep does not mind much --
           not even the necessary attention to his wounds,
                       ragged bite marks on his neck

from an old dog ricocheted
                back to wildness
                            by the archaic scent of prey.

The sheep and his brother are Zen masters
                of the barnyard, accepting
                           rain and grass and first aid

with the same slow breath and placid stare.
                They swallow the world whole
                            in a way we have forgotten,

who cannot see a rainbow arc
                across a summer sky without
                            unprisming it into white light,

into something we think we understand.